Two of China’s biggest social media companies, Tencent and Sina, have reportedly been punished by the government and forced to temporarily suspend comments on their micro-blogging sites, after the authorities clamped down in response to unsubstantiated online rumours of a coup in Beijing last month.

Big Blue has been given the ultimate big data gig - collecting and analysing data all the way back to the universe's early history, thanks to a brief from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and a €32.9m cheque from the Dutch government. ASTRON and IBM will collaborate on a computer capable of ingesting the expected exabyte a day that will be generated by the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

Geek Treat of the Week
If flying a remote control helicopter is no longer enough of a challenge, it’s time to move to the next level and add a little spice to the mix. The Battling Gyro helicopter allows you to do just that by including an ‘attack’ button on the remote control.

The dividing line between creative writing and climate science - sometimes thin - has been triumphantly dissolved. A new postgraduate course at the University of East Anglia hopes to bring together "researchers in the environmental sciences, philosophy, history and literature to develop new ways of thinking about environmental change and social transitions".

The Coalition's plans to hugely step up surveillance of the internet aren't new - indeed they date from well before the Coalition - but readers could be forgiven for thinking it's all brand new this morning after a quick look at the national newspapers today.

Review
At only 7.7mm thick, Toshiba boasts that its new tablet is the slimmest yet and it’s a claim I can’t argue with either. Dubbed the Excite in the US and the rather less exciting AT200 elsewhere, Tosh's slim slab is 0.9mm thinner than the previous title holder, the Samsung Galaxy 10.1. While the Apple iPad 2 seems positively portly measuring up at 1.1mm thicker.

For most of the past 20 years, the provisioning and daily operations of IT systems has been mainly concerned with specifying the physical components – servers, storage and networking – required to deliver the expected service levels.

Adam Sandler's cross-dressing "comedy" Jack and Jill made a little bit of movie history over the weekend by scooping all ten Razzies, with the actor sensationally picking up both Worst Actor and Worst Actress awards.

IBM is getting ready to launch a new server platform, known internally as the "Next Generation Platform" and also known by that moniker in discussions with business partners that have been briefed over several weeks.

Analysis
Tons more mouldering bilge scooped from the wreck of RMS Titanic has hit the science news this week: it tells us nothing of note about the liner's sinking, but it does tell us quite a lot about the state of scientific publishing.

It has been five years since Forrest Norrod and his colleagues at Dell drew up the first custom server design on a napkin at a bar at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas, getting the server maker into the tailoring business. Dell now custom fits servers for very precise workloads and can cater to the tight data center power and cooling requirements found at hyperscale web operators.

Internet Explorer's share of the browser market went up last month, by 0.99 per cent, according to new data from Net Market Share. Microsoft's slow claw-back of market share from its rivals puts Internet Explorer's global market share at 53.83 per cent, saving it from plunging below the 50 per cent mark and marking an overall net gain of 1.2 per cent in the past five months.

PC and server maker Dell never made a machine that needed a dumb terminal, but it does make servers that could end up driving the 21st century equivalent: the thin client served up a virtual desktop over the internet. That is why Dell has shelled out an undisclosed sum to snap up Wyse Technologies, the volume shipper of thin clients.

Ailing monitor biz Proview has a green light to pursue its long-running dispute with Apple over the IPAD trademark after a Shenzhen court rejected a request from one of its creditors to liquidate the company.

IT conglomerate Fujitsu has fired up the first installation of its PrimeHPC FX10 massively parallel Sparc-based supercomputer, a machine called Oakleaf-FX that weighs in at 1.13 petaflops of peak raw performance.

The City of Sydney is going ahead with its long-planned “trigeneration” proposal, in which localized power plants on building roofs and basements will supplement – and eventually partly replace – the coal-fired electricity that currently powers the city.